RE: When is a Religious Belief Delusional?
September 6, 2018 at 7:20 pm
(This post was last modified: September 6, 2018 at 7:37 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
@Jorg
We share that tick with qualitatively dumb abstraction systems of all description. If some input (or series of inputs) is labeled as x (in case of believers "god") then regardless of whether those inputs are firing in error or are actually not, in an external sense, x "god" - the system takes the product x as inviolable truth from which it operates, not a conclusion it works too. It can't do otherwise.
While I have no way of knowing this, and we have no way of determining so at present - the concept of and belief in god, from a functional standpoint (and not just this concept but any concept) may be as simple as a label for the output of a gate. A river of impulse. I sometimes like to remind myself of that, when I'm considering disparate mythologies and trying to come up with a common thread. Dumb machine may be overthinking the operation of dumb machine. Any arbitrary input can satisfy the function of being labeled as such-and-such, and by simple virtue of having been labeled it will present itself as religious conviction does in human beings.
Just as I can rig my pc to recognize the "k" keystroke as an "x", through programming -or- hardwiring.....or unintentionally as a defect of both/either. Delusion requires no grander explanation than this, even if the experience of the delusion is orders of magnitude more grand that it's functional explanation. Consider a person who thinks that an inch is precisely half as long as it is and how that explodes into a vast and wild series of misconceptions about the reality around them.
-a potential innocent cause.
We share that tick with qualitatively dumb abstraction systems of all description. If some input (or series of inputs) is labeled as x (in case of believers "god") then regardless of whether those inputs are firing in error or are actually not, in an external sense, x "god" - the system takes the product x as inviolable truth from which it operates, not a conclusion it works too. It can't do otherwise.
While I have no way of knowing this, and we have no way of determining so at present - the concept of and belief in god, from a functional standpoint (and not just this concept but any concept) may be as simple as a label for the output of a gate. A river of impulse. I sometimes like to remind myself of that, when I'm considering disparate mythologies and trying to come up with a common thread. Dumb machine may be overthinking the operation of dumb machine. Any arbitrary input can satisfy the function of being labeled as such-and-such, and by simple virtue of having been labeled it will present itself as religious conviction does in human beings.
Just as I can rig my pc to recognize the "k" keystroke as an "x", through programming -or- hardwiring.....or unintentionally as a defect of both/either. Delusion requires no grander explanation than this, even if the experience of the delusion is orders of magnitude more grand that it's functional explanation. Consider a person who thinks that an inch is precisely half as long as it is and how that explodes into a vast and wild series of misconceptions about the reality around them.
-a potential innocent cause.
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